Sarah Seymour’s Skills Give New Meaning to “Busy as a Bee.”
By Abby Bowman
Editor’s Note: Driving Change is a new column in AGRR magazine dedicated to spotlighting traditionally under-represented people in the auto glass repair and replacement industry. If you or someone you know fits this description and would like to be featured, email abowman@glass.com for consideration.
Sarah Seymour wears many hats, and she drew inspiration from all of them to become the 2024 Auto Glass Calibration Competition Grand Champion. Besides being an expert calibrator, she’s a savvy businessperson, a wife, a mother, an outdoorsperson – and a beekeeper.
“My bees have taught me to move swiftly and with purpose, and that has helped me both in my everyday life and at the competition,” she says.
Thanks to those bee-like instincts, Seymour used a calibration system that required more manual measurements than the other competitors’ systems. The time and extra precision this required could have disadvantaged her, but Seymour looks at it with the mindset of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“I’ve been using that system for quite some time, and I pretty much have it choreographed like a dance,” she says.
Like a worker bee communicating with the queen of the hive, Seymour tunes herself in to the car’s needs as she calibrates.
“I talk to the car; I get to know it before I start working on it,” she says. “I visualize from the car’s perspective when putting the targets up. To me, it’s not just another calibration. It’s a car that needs to see correctly.”
This strategy didn’t develop overnight.
Seymour met her husband, Larry Seymour, when the two were fresh out of high school. He would eventually help her enter the auto glass industry.
“He was working for one of the national [auto glass] corporations at the time, and we’ve been together ever since,” she says.
The pair founded Seminole Auto Glass in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2006. Seymour worked in management at a local company unrelated to the industry until 2010.
“That was when I made the leap from my other corporate job into the auto glass world,” she says.
At first, Seymour worked strictly on the office-management side of Seminole Auto Glass. But as time went on, she became fascinated by the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) the newer cars had and decided to learn how to do ADAS calibrations.
“I think it’s neat how ADAS technology has evolved over the years to almost let the car drive itself…” she says. “That human-machine interface interests me.”
She’s found that customers and peers alike have a unique view of women in the industry.
“I think people look at women in the industry with much respect,” she says. “It’s kind of cool because there’s not a lot of us.”
Customers pay attention to what she has to say, Seymour says. Seminole Auto Glass advertises on the radio frequently, so customers will hear her voice before they come in and get excited about tying the face to the voice.
“It’s good for people to see women in this industry,” she says.
Seymour does some repairs, but specializes in calibration while continuing to manage the office and do advertising for Seminole Auto Glass.
This penchant for calibration led her to compete at Auto Glass Week™ (AGW) 2024. Her husband and son were there to support her, but from a slight distance.
“My son has a medical condition; he has seizures,” Seymour says. “That was why I hadn’t been able to compete in years past.”
She says her son, Larry Seymour III, was first diagnosed with epilepsy at the beginning of 2023, and either she or her husband has to be with him at all times. Because her son’s medications were slightly off, he and Seymour’s husband had to stay at the family’s Airbnb in Orlando to nurse him back to health.
“It took a lot for me even to be able to be there this year,” Seymour says. “I was all alone in the competition.”
Thankfully, she befriended some people at AGW who were able to cheer her on and make sure she got pictures of herself competing.
Though it was difficult not to think about her absent family, she did her best to focus on the task before her. When the time came to celebrate her victory, her husband and son were beside her.
“It was surreal. When [competition coordinator] Sarah Bauder called my name, I had already visualized it … so I was like, ‘That’s it!’” Seymour says. “I turned around and looked at my husband and my son and said, ‘I got it!’”
Seymour was delighted that they were able to be there to see the culmination of all the hard work they had supported her in. She was especially moved by her son, who, before getting sick, had worked alongside her and her husband “priming windshields since he was able to see over them.”
“He’s told me many times since it was over, ‘Mom, you did great, I knew you could do it,’” Seymour says. “He’s been a huge support.”
Now that she’s won, Seymour has a few more goals. One is to improve her hunting skills.
“When you’re doing recalibration, you shoot at targets all day long,” she says. “I would like to translate that to my personal life and go hunting and successfully shoot a deer.”
Another is to expand her calibration repertoire.
“There’s more to calibrations than what I have been doing on the windshield side,” Seymour says. “I want to expand on that more and broaden out to the body shops and dealerships and see how I can help them to do calibrations on the whole car, calibrations on radar and whatever other systems there may be.”
Her son’s health permitting, Seymour would also like to compete again.
“I enjoyed it a lot. It was nerve-wracking going into it, but it was fun,” she says. “The excitement drove me to want to do it again.”
Seymour encourages other women to get into calibration. “There’s no reason why we can’t,” she says. “There should be no difference between the guys and the girls … Do it. It’s fun, it’s different and we need more of us out there.”
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